A Suggested Campaign Song

We are waging—can you doubt it?A campaign so calm and stillNo one knows a thing about it And we hope they never will. No one knows What we oppose,And we hope they never will.

We are ladylike and quiet,Here a whisper—there a hint;Never speeches, bands or riot,Nothing suitable for print. No one knows What we oppose,For we never speak for print.

Sometimes in profound seclusion,In some far (but homelike) spot,We will make a dark allusion:“We’re opposed to you-know-what.” No one knows What we oppose,For we call it “You-Know-What.”

This poem is in the public domain.

Alice Duer Miller was born on July 28, 1874, in Staten Island, New York. Her work was influential to women’s suffrage, and her satirical poetry collection, Are Women People? (1915), became a slogan for the movement. She died August 22, 1942, in New York City.

More by Alice Duer Miller

I am old-fashioned, and I think it rightThat man should know, by Nature’s laws eternal,The proper way to rule, to earn, to fight,And exercise those functions called paternal;But even I a little bit rebelAt finding that he knows my job as well.

At least he’s always ready to expound it,Especially in legislative hall,The joys, the cares, the halos that surround it,“How women feel”—he knows that best of all.In fact his thesis is that no one canKnow what is womanly except a man.

I am old-fashioned, and I am contentWhen he explains the world of art and scienceAnd government—to him divinely sent—I drink it in with ladylike compliance.But cannot listen—no, I’m only human—While he instructs me how to be a woman.

(“Three bills known as the Thompson-Bewley cannery bills have been advanced to third reading in the Senate and Assembly at Albany. One permits the canners to work their employés seven days a week, a second allows them to work women after 9 p.m. and a third removes every restriction upon the hours of labor of women and minors.”—Zenas L. Potter, former chief cannery investigator for New York State Factory Investigating Commission.)

Let us not to an unrestricted dayImpediments admit. Work is not workTo our employés, but a merry play;They do not ask the law’s excuse to shirk.Ah, no, the canning season is at hand,When summer scents are on the air distilled,When golden fruits are ripening in the land,And silvery tins are gaping to be filled.Now to the cannery with jocund mienBefore the dawn come women, girls and boys,Whose weekly hours (a hundred and nineteen)Seem all too short for their industrious joys.If this be error and be proved, alasThe Thompson-Bewley bills may fail to pass!